Involvement by a network administrator to repair a damaged communications network can result in unacceptable delays and lost data. Reliable communication networks take into account potential degradation or failure of the channels over which traffic signals are transported through redundancy in the network. The need to quickly repair communication of networks leads to the automation of the controls by which redundancies may be accessed.
The objective of such automation is to transfer a traffic signal to a redundant, or protection, channel from a degraded or failed channel with small enough latencies that the process is transparent to end users. To meet this objective an upper boundary on latency is commonly set at fifty milliseconds, with even shorter latencies preferable. However, the control signaling involved in coordinating a determination to transfer a traffic signal from a compromised channel often pushes and/or transgresses this upper boundary.